


The Feline Persuasion: Or How Crowley Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Cat

by Think_of_a_Wonderful_Thought



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale loves cats, Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley is terrified of cats but he's trying!, Long term pining leads to domestic bliss, Other, and Crowley, ineffable husbands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 16:18:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19232662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Think_of_a_Wonderful_Thought/pseuds/Think_of_a_Wonderful_Thought
Summary: It's a fundamental truth of the unvierse that Crowley hates cats. So of course Zira loves them.In which the demon Crowley slowly comes to terms with his hatred for all things feline and wins himself a husband along the way.





	The Feline Persuasion: Or How Crowley Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Cat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyRaincloud](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyRaincloud/gifts).



> This is as close to fluffy as I think I will ever get. Take that as you will. 
> 
> Please let me know if you want anything specific tagged- there's mentions of some real life historical events (plague, slavery, revolution and war).  
> Nothing in this is violently explicit, but please watch out if any of this is sensitive for you.

Crowley did not like cats. It was one of the fundamental truths of the universe, written into the nature of the universe at the birth of creation, adamantine, unequivocal and absolute. They were (in his mind) ruthless creatures, dangerous predators capable of wreaking untold devastation on the local wildlife with teeth and claws and a love of torment that would put any demon to shame. Even the smallest of them could take on creatures much bigger and badder than themselves, no matter how sharp the fangs of their prey, or how deadly their venom. That Crowley had once been a snake did not factor into his hatred at all. At. All.

In those early days- _the_ early days, as it were, before he and Eve had got to chatting and that whole thing with the apple sort of took over the rest of his existence- the majority of his days had been spent either basking in the newly formed sun, or slithering as quickly away from the furry menaces as he possibly could. So, if -and that was a rather large _if_ \- Crowley were to have a healthy respect for all things feline, he didn’t think that anyone Up Above or Down Below should be able to judge him. That did not mean, of course, that they _wouldn’t_. But that didn’t matter, because Crowley did not have a Thing about cats and if he did _no one would ever know_.

That would have been the end of the matter, were it not for one pesky, entirely-too-fearless-for-his-own-good angel, who seemed to think that the ferocious, fanged fiends were, of all things, cute. This simple fact was the cause of millennia of stress for Crowley and, he was certain, was responsible for over half of his metaphysical grey hairs.

It had begun, as most things had, with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. Crowley had been feeling perturbed by a few things- not least the eternal frustration of innocent beings being kicked out of paradise for having the audacity to show a little curiosity- and he had gone up to the wall to have a chat with the Guardian of the Eastern Gate. The angel had always seemed very _polite_ to Crowley, exchanging small, impersonal nods with him whenever the two of them had crossed paths in the Garden. It was if the being just didn’t know how not to be decent and kind, even to a demon. So, Crowley had sought out the only being he thought might give a sympathetic ear to both his existential dread and his concern for the humans. Aziraphale had been all he could have hoped for and more; not only had the angel willing to actually _talk_ to him, to discuss ineffability and Providence and all that jazz, but he had only gone and given his flaming sword to Adam.

They had talked for a while, watching the young couple make their way from Eden. The humans had looked so small and vulnerable, battling against the harsh, barren expanse of desert before them; Crowley had been experimenting with the first experimental tendrils of a feeling he would later come to know as guilt, when the lion had pounced. Crowley stood frozen solid, convinced he was about to witness the deaths of the humans he had grown uncomfortably fond of, when Adam spun around, flaming sword in hand.

The fight was drawn-out and nerve-wracking, both man and beast unfamiliar with the concept of fighting for one’s life. Both took and dealt wounds in their turn. Still, eventually, Adam won, thrusting the sword deep into the heart of the lion as the very first rains broke out over the Earth. Crowley let out a loud cheer. In that moment, the demon realised that he would be forever grateful to the selfless, kind being at his side who had risked the wrath of Heaven to give the humans that weapon.

The two humans slowly traipsed away from the lion’s corpse, huddled together against the wind buffeting them and the icy water that blasted them from on high. The two immortal beings stayed on the wall, watching as the young couple put their backs to paradise and braved the new world before them.  Both angel and demon stayed like that for hours, enduring the deluge that was battering down on them with a stoicism that would come in handy in the many years that they would later spend living in central London. Slowly, Crowley began to realise that the angel was making small sniffling noises. He peered at him from the corner of his eye, deeply uncomfortable.

“They’ll be fine,” he said in his best, most breezy voice. “They’ve got the sword!”

He leant over to nudge Aziraphale in the ribs, smiling widely at the almost instinctive disapproving tut he got in response.

“It’s not that,” the angel finally replied with a sniffle and an embarrassed half-smile. “It’s just…that poor cat!”

That was the first time that Crowley realised what a dangerous idiot he had made acquaintances-maybe-someday-perhaps-friends with. The angel had been in tears at the prospect of one less lion in the world- something that Crowley thought rather a cause for celebration. Things only got worse from then on.

Centuries passed, and Crowley came to realise just how much of a Cat Person™ Aziraphale truly was. He observed the angel from afar (which was a completely justifiable thing to do in his role as the demon of Earth thank you very much) and had seen how the being’s face lit up whenever he saw one of the damned creatures, no matter how big, how furry, or (apparently) how murderous. It made no sense to Crowley, and it also presented a rather large problem. If he was ever going to get close to the angel (in a purely professional, temptation-based capacity, of course) he was going to have to endure the proximity of the vile feline fiends. In short, his next step was clear: he was going to have to learn to like cats.

The latter part of the 34th century BC, as the humans would later come to call it, would always be known to Crowley as ‘That Time I Lost my Mind and Tried Immersion Therapy’. It was one of those ideas that Crowley would regret for the rest of eternity, like soft jazz, or the mullet. The original thought was thus: Crowley would attempt, over what seemed like a reasonable thirty or so years, to live with three of the smallest cats that he could find- some kind of desert creature that had taken to hunting the mice in the grain store of the local villages.

He had lasted half a decade, realised that the three cats wouldn’t make it to thirty and abandoned the whole experiment with a large amount of relish and relief. He had hated every fucking second of it. The cats had spent half the time hissing at him and the other stalking him and pouncing on him in his sleep. Crowley had not been impressed by that: he loved his sleep. In fact, that was the only thing that he had in common with the little furry menaces. It was almost as if they had a sixth sense that told them that he had once been a creature they would stalk like the vermin they had followed in from the desert. Their heads would turn, tracking his movement as he walked from room to room, tails swishing ominously and the promise of murder in their foul yellow eyes. Also, they had scratched. Were Crowley not a creature of Hell himself, he would have thought the bastards sent from Down Below just to torture the poor humans of this world. By the time that the Nile had flooded for the fifth and final time, Crowley had decided that he had had enough. It was simple: he hated cats and they hated him.

Eventually, Crowley had stopped barricading all of his doors and windows and let the creatures roam free. They had brushed past his feet with vindictive little hisses and then run off into the great wide world, where they no doubt had gone on to live lives of chaos and petty cruelty- not that Crowley would know , seeing as he never bothered to check on them ever again. The demon had emerged from his home into the bright light of a new century, entirely convinced that he was done with all things cat for at least a millennium. Only, as Crowley was soon to learn, Earth and its humans simply didn’t work that way.

It seemed that a strange man rocking up in town, entirely out of the blue, building a rather ostentatious place for himself in less than an hour and then proceeding to shut himself away for a half a decade with only three small cats for company had drawn a lot more attention than he’d realised. It also seemed that- as whenever humans found themselves confronted with something they Did Not Get- they had simply fallen back into the age-old habit of proclaiming the unknown, improbable and just plain weird, to be something greater: eternal and omnipotent. Except, as usual, the humans had fucked up and got the wrong end of the stick. Instead of noticing the actual demon in their midst (one of the only two immortal being currently walking the Earth) the humans had only gone and slapped godhood on the fucking cats.

Thus was ancient Egypt born. Hell was delighted of course. Crowley’s antics had inadvertently inspired the humans to find a whole new pantheon of Gods to worship. In the name of these new gods, humanity built huge monuments into the sky in defiance of the very idea of the impossible, waged war with their neighbours and rivals and enslaved countless generations of people. Crowley got a sneering, backhanded compliment and a commendation from someone Down There, whilst the cats lived lives of complete comfort and constant adulation. Crowley thought it felt about right for the usual way of things.

When he and Aziraphale finally crossed paths once again somewhere near the Red Sea, the angel was oddly delighted with the course of events (not that Crowley would ever admit his own part in the whole business). It seemed that although Heaven was furious with the Worshipping of False Gods and all that stuff, Aziraphale thought that the cats were simply getting the kind of unconditional love and devotion to which they were, always had been and always would be entitled. Crowley had sighed and resigned himself to the fact that he had at least learnt how to tolerate the menaces, at least long enough to be around the idiotic angel.

Things went rather smoothly for a while after that. Crowley crossed paths with Aziraphale every now and then, and they soon started going for drinks between their respective temptations and blessings. The world was growing around them, the humans pushing both physical and metaphysical boundaries and learning so much about their own potential. Crowley witnessed the invention of democracy in Athens and the birth of Christianity in Bethlehem. He saw Socrates drink hemlock and watched as Greece and Western Europe and North Africa and the Levant fell one by one into the ever expanding boundaries of the Roman Empire.

Crowley loved Rome. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why, but the place just felt alive. All the petty politics and bickering, the manipulations and machinations felt comfortable and familiar. He’d loved Greece to of course, but that had been for entirely different reasons. In the city of Rome, Crowley felt like he was at the centre of humanity, watching as invention and innovation spread out across the world. Of course, were he to have disapproved of their methods in bringing ‘civilisation’ to other countries, he never would have said; Hell strongly approved of Imperialism.

He wasn’t fond of all the things the Romans came up with, naturally. Whilst the sanitation and the roads were great ideas, he had a fair few issues with their blood sports and intensely stratified social rankings, not to mention the slavery that was the backbone of the infrastructure of their very fucking huge empire. Still he mostly let them be, left them to fight each other to death with pitchforks and nets for the entertainment of the masses, let them poison and backstab each other in order to climb to the top of the heap, and tried to ignore just exactly why all of the chaos and violence might feel too familiar to the one being on Earth who had seen Hell.

As usual, all that changed when Aziraphale came to town. The angel had a love of oysters and a charming naivety about just how far the empire would go to keep their metropolitan restaurants in high stock of the delicacy. Aziraphale didn’t visit the city all too frequently and had come back for a visit, after only a century or so away, to find that the whole damn empire had converted to Christianity. He had been so perplexed by the whole thing that he had agreed to stick around for a bit longer after dinner to take a tour from the city’s resident demon. See the sights and get back up to speed, as it were.

It had been a huge mistake. Things were going fine until Aziraphale saw the Colosseum. Crowley had tried to stop him from going in, tried to stop him from seeing the brutal, senseless violence that the gladiators brought upon each other with their swords and their spears and the wheels of their chariots. But the angel was stubborn and had gone anyway.

It was strange, in a way, that Crowley hadn’t seen it coming sooner. He had anticipated the angel’s reaction to blood sports and the baying crowd, and he had foreseen his horror and dismay at the cries of the unfortunate souls thrust in the pit with neither weapon nor hope of victory in a twisted facsimile of ‘justice’. What he had not, however, expected (although he really should have, given past events) was quite how upset the angel was at the use of animals in the amphitheatre. Specifically the cats.

“How dare they?” Aziraphale had seethed, making Crowley wonder, not for the first time, if the angel might actually prefer the damned felines to the humans.

Crowley had done his best to console the furious angel, but had backed off when the being started to look a little smitey. He was, after all, a creature of self-preservation, and he had no wish to cross the Angel of the Eastern Gate and certainly not when he was in a tiff.

So Crowley had taken some time off from Rome, wandered north and west for a bit until he found a kingdom with a bit of bloodlust of their own in their veins. He didn’t even need to tempt them- they were already marching against the empire, laying waste to the lands around them. The Visigoths were a force to be reckoned with, and they sacked Rome so brutally and efficiently that the empire never really recovered. Hell was ecstatic.

Crowley looked over the city after the final fires had gone out, mourning the loss of a place that he had once loved so dearly. He had been there all of five minutes when Aziraphale came to stand at his side, a twist to his smile that no angel true to Heaven should ever have been able to conjure, as he looked out towards the heavily damaged shell of the Colosseum. Crowley knew that he had made the right call.

Heaven, however, wasn’t quite as thrilled by the turn of events as its representative on Earth. A couple of years after the chaos had finally died down, when the city had long since picked itself up, dusted itself off and set about rebuilding itself with such pragmatism and industriousness that even Crowley had felt inspired, Heaven once again came to Earth.

The first hint that Crowley got that shenanigans were afoot was the all-too-familiar voice of Gabriel, as the angel loudly admired a bunch of phallic pottery in the market place. The archangel’s voice, as ever, carried. Crowley followed the noise to a side alley, where he engaged in the ancient and dishonourable art of eavesdropping. Apparently Heaven weren’t too pleased with the fact that the newly crowned centre of Christianity on Earth had been wrecked and ravaged. Especially as Aziraphale had seemingly done sweet fuck all about it. Heaven wanted to know why and Aziraphale clearly didn’t have an excuse.

Demonstrating the kind of quick thinking that had got him out of many of his own close-calls with Head Office, Crowley slipped back into the market, found himself a clear bit of space and started preaching loudly to the masses. The humans were remarkably responsive, and in no time at all a small crowd had assembled in front of him.

“And another thing…” he proclaimed with an indignant little nod. “I bet none of this would have happened if Jupiter were still in charge of things.”

The humans glanced amongst themselves, muttering contemplatively.

“Oh, yes,” Crowley continued, keeping one eye on the alley where he knew Gabriel had stopped to listen to him. “You think Mars would have stood for it? I’ll tell you what I think…”

The humans huddled closer, enraptured by his words.

“I reckon we got soft with all this new religion malarkey,” the humans nodded; someone let out a yell of approval. “I say it’s time we remembered what used to make Rome great!”

The humans let out a loud cheer, full of the spirit of revolution, angry with the new status quo, and desperate for a return to the halcyon days of yore when being a Roman citizen really _meant_ something. They were whipped into a fury, turning over tables and smashing goods, eyes alive for the first time in months.

Crowley left them to it and nipped back to his post by the alleyway. Ignoring the shouts behind him as the centurions finally turned up to put down the mini-revolt, he focused on the conversation of the two angels. Aziraphale had taken the bait and was loudly lamenting the terribly wily agent of Hell who had been stirring up so much discord in Rome. It was all that the angel had been able to do, apparently, to keep the city from slaughtering itself in homage to the pagan gods of its ancestors. Unfortunately, he had been so preoccupied in the city that he hadn’t even had time to think about the invading army until it was too late to stop anything. For an angel, Aziraphale could lie like Hell.

Gabriel left soon after, giving Aziraphale a commendation for good work before he left. The two beings were clearly very confused about the whole affair, but Aziraphale accepted the shining piece of paper as if it were his due and smiled beatifically until the archangel once again disappeared Up There.

From then on, Aziraphale became Zira and Crowley irritably added cats to his list of beings to protect at all costs. He was not, he told himself, ruining any more places he liked simply because they were a bit mean to felines. Absolutely not. But Crowley had always been very good at lying to himself.

As the centuries flew by and plague and war and sheer bloody idiocy ravaged the world in their own turn, Crowley slowly got closer to his angel. Of course, he knew that he cared for the being; he’d known that since the Garden and the way he had looked on with such care and concern as Adam had wielded the blade of Heaven. Still, it was only when Crowley found himself wandering through London in the midst of the second time Pestilence had visited plague down on Europe, that it really, finally sank in just how stupidly, head-over-heels he was for the angel.

It started- as had so many things since he had come to Earth- with a cat. The officials in London, convinced that the plague was being spread through their pets, had ordered the widespread slaughter of every cat, dog, hamster and goldfish within the metropolitan area. Once upon a time, this news would simply have made Crowley scoff at the ludicrousness of killing off the only local natural predators of the animals that were _actually_ spreading the disease, but things had long since changed. Crowley knew that Zira was struggling with all the death and devastation, he knew that it was bringing back memories from the first time they had waded through the streets of London, the smell of sickness pervading the air and bodies piling up faster than either Heaven or Hell could hope to slow. Zira was close to the edge, and Crowley was not going to let the humans push him over by killing his angel’s favourite animals. Not when it wouldn’t even help.

It was half-way through transporting the entire domestic feline and canine population of the city of London out of said city and into a nice, uninhabited island in the South Pacific, when Crowley realised just exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it. He finished the job, getting all the furry beasts to safety (the city was very impressed with how quickly their exterminators had cleared the streets) and then sat on the white sand beach of his chosen refuge, idly patting the head of a terrier puppy that had decided to curl up on his lap. Fuck, he realised, as the puppy let out a soft little bark, he had gone and fallen in love with an angel. He was furious with himself, and with the damned angel for being so cute and kind and selfless and so much more. He waited out the rest of the year on a tropical beach, before finally bringing the pets back to London and a bunch of very, very confused owners.

The plague soon gave way to the fire which soon gave way to the rise of a whole new empire. That, in turn, led to the invention of entirely new ways for humans to hurt and degrade each other, as well as a revival of a few classics that would have put Hell to shame. Crowley sulked for a large part of it, although he would call it ‘skulking’ and ‘looming ominously’ himself. He hung around at the edges of history, watching as Zira ate and danced and drank with the humans and became more and more _alive_ with each passing year. Then Zira got captured in Paris (getting _crepes_ of all things) and Crowley had been forced to step in and rescue the beautiful idiot. They ate lunch to the sound of the guillotine and made plans to come back sometime in the next spring.

The more time that he spent with his angel, the more that Crowley realised that said being had no clue how his ancient enemy and long-time best friend truly felt about him. Not that it would have mattered anyway; Aziraphale, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, was loyal to Heaven, and Hell itself would freeze over before they allowed a demon and an angel to be anything more than eternal foes. Not that Hell would be all that much better about it, but Crowley had long-since stopped giving too much of a shit about what they wanted. They never bothered to check up on him all that much, and his little memos Down There had really done the trick for keeping the infernal forces off his back. He wasn’t really that friendly with any of them anyway, had never really been part of the ‘in’ crowd, even before the big Fall. To be entirely honest, Crowley strongly suspected that if he turned round and proclaimed that he’d fallen in love with the archangel Gabriel himself, Hell would probably just nod and sigh in bemused exasperation at ‘that weirdo Crowley’, before they set to ripping him limb from limb and dashing the remnants of his essence across the far reaches of civilisation. But all of that was hypothetical; Zira was oblivious and would remain so, and Crowley would pine from a distance and seethe at his own weakness for falling for someone so beyond his reach.

With his mind being in the state that it was at that point in time, Crowley fell very naturally in with the Romantics. He and Byron had become fast friends very quickly, although he grew rather chummy with Shelley too, after he ran into them both in Geneva. It was one of the best summers in his whole existence. The young Mrs Shelley had written the most incredible book, and was only too happy to debate the nature of sin and the consequences of unbridled curiosity with Crowley. He did not, of course, mention his own involvement with the Fall of Man, but she was only too willing to listen to him rant about the injustices of higher powers and the paradox of free will. The young artists offered a camaraderie and joie de vivre that he had never before experienced; for a few brief weeks, he was able to take his mind away from his angel. Eventually though, Head Office intruded with some fresh orders, and he was forced to leave them all and head back to England. 

He fell off the map for a while after that, taking a well-earnt nap that lasted for a large portion of rest of the nineteenth century. He awoke to find Zira waiting for him, confused and put out and more than a little hurt that he had missed their biennial lunch dates. Crowley had all but melted at his angel’s pout and had realised, with a rushing feeling (not unlike the one he had felt when he had Fallen) that he was not going to get over his angel anytime soon.

That revelation had led to the whole _thing_ with the Holy Water. It had seemed, to Crowley, like a sensible get out plan for whenever Hell cottoned on to just what he’d been getting away with up on Earth all these years, but Zira had emphatically disagreed. It had taken a well-timed demonic miracle and book-rescue for the angel to finally talk to him again and then another couple of decades -and a very elaborate plan for a Church heist- before the angel gave in and just gave him the Holy Water. It had taken Crowley completely by surprise; it was proof that his angel trusted him, would give him access to the most deadly weapon against demons in all existence and trust that he wasn’t going to do anything too stupid with it. Crowley decided to stick around his angel a bit more permanently from then on.

London in the sixties was the place to be, and Crowley took a lot of delight in watching humans trip themselves stupid on LSD and defy their parents and the conventions of their ancestors by pushing fashion to its limits, hair bigger and skirts shorter than ever before. Also, Zira had all but sequestered himself in his shop in Soho, venturing out for meals and the odd trip to watch the latest Bond film at the pictures. If Crowley wanted to see his angel he was stuck transporting himself in and out of London every five minutes. In the end he gave up, got himself a flat, and started taking the Bentley down to the West End a lot more. Plus, the car got him some very envious looks, and Crowley had always liked pride as a sin.

The problem that came with driving was that over time the roads started to fill up more, getting busier and busier as more and more humans travelled further and further away from home to work. Crowley, used to driving like a, well like a demon, had been forced to learn to mind his surroundings a bit better, to watch other road users and to actually use the breaks on his car if necessary. It was annoying, and frustrating, especially as the decades wore on and congestion in London brought Hell on Earth, even before Crowley started fucking around with the M25. But, Zira wouldn’t leave Soho, so Crowley was forced to suck it up and learn to drive like the hordes of Hell weren’t on his heels. Even if he never fully mastered the use of his rear view mirror, or indicators, Crowley’s diligence finally paid off in the most unexpected of ways.

One day, in the mid-nineties whilst driving Zira to a new tapas place, something orange and furry ran out in front of the Bentley and sat in the middle of the road. Crowley jammed on the breaks and brought his beloved car to a screeching halt. The cat blinked at him, refusing to move. Zira _cooed_. He was out of the car in seconds, completely ignoring both the blaring horns of the traffic piling up behind them and the fact that they were in the middle of the A202. Zira scooped up the little menace, hugged it to his chest and then proceeded to get _back into the Bentley_ , all the while muttering reassurances to the blasted thing. The worst part was, Crowley _let him._ He ignored the unblinking yellow gaze of the monster in his angel’s arms, ignored the swishing tail and the horrible feeling of being _watched_ and simply drove on. He even took directions from Zira to the address on the _thing’s_ collar and waited whilst his angel ran up to the door and gently handed the bloody thing over to the teary, over-effusive owner. They didn’t even end up getting lunch. Still, Zira had looked at him with such bright-eyed gratitude that even Crowley couldn’t find it in him to be too cross. He loved it when Zira smiled like that. Fuck it all to Hell and back: he was soft too.

Then the whole thing with the antichrist happened and the impending end of days served only to make Crowley realise how little of a shit he gave about the ineffable fucking plan and the ultimate battle of Heaven and Hell. To put it simply, he _liked_ Earth, he _liked_ humans, and he didn’t think that they all deserved to die simply because Heaven and Hell felt like playing a high-stakes game of Risk with the planet. He offered goodness-knows-how-many times to just leave with Zira. He knew they wouldn’t win against the combined forces of their respective Head Offices, but there was a chance, however slim, that they could disappear to some quite corner of the universe and make it their own. But Aziraphale, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, was loyal to Heaven. They stayed on Earth and faced down the four horsemen and the antichrist and an angry Scottish witch hunter; the apocalypse didn’t happen anyway.

After it was all over and done with, respective middle fingers thrown to the forces of Heaven and Hell in the best bit of improve comedy and fancy dress that Crowley had _ever_ taken part in, something had changed between the two of them. Zira was no longer so hung up on doing the Right Thing and Crowley was free, finally, of the weight of expectation upon him. He had faced the hordes of Hell with his angel at his side and had walked through Hellfire in the middle of Heaven itself. There was nothing Crowley had to fear, and that was the best feeling in all of creation.

Zira didn’t take up his offer of a place to stay, not at first anyway; the bookshop was restored to its former glory and Crowley knew that his angel couldn’t bear to be too far from all that paper and ink for too long. Still, eventually they started spending more and more time together. Within a few years they were spending half their nights crashing on each other’s sofas. After a bit of time this became each other’s beds (Zira got a bad back if he spent too long on the couch and Crowley got too cold in Zira’s draughty bookshop).

After a few more years, Zira tentatively suggested that they look for a place out in the South Downs. He’d been there a few times and it was lovely and quiet and thought it would be the perfect break from London. Crowley had bought a place and moved his stuff in by the end of the week. Zira took a little longer, having to sort out the bookshop.

He had been very worried that he would have to actually start _selling_ the books, or else close the shop forever, but had been intensely gratified to find a surly young woman almost as opposed to the idea of selling anything as he was. He had offered her a job on the spot and promised to pay her well above minimum wage if she would be as rude and unhelpful to customers as possible, open and close the shop at odd hours, operate entirely without any managerial supervision and look after the large stream of cats who wandered in and out of the shop at will. The young woman had started crying and called him an angel; Zira had been very flustered. Crowley had had to reassure him for a good few hours that, as a veteran of the retail industry, Zira had just presented the young woman with the closest thing to Heaven on Earth.

They retired to the countryside soon after, Zira absolutely certain that his shop would never sell a book in his new assistant manager’s lifetime, and took to their own sickeningly domestic pursuits. The angel took up gardening, quilting and trading impeccably well-mannered, passive aggressive barbs with the homophobic lady on the Parish council. Crowley fell in with a group of dad’s who took turns sitting in each other’s sheds listening to tapes of Queen and talking about the good old days of the mid-seventies. He’d even joined their pub quiz team. It was peaceful and fun and everything that Crowley would never have dared hoped for before that fateful day in Eden. He was happy and so was Zira and that was worth all the shit they’d had to go through to get there.

There were cats, of course; how could there not be? Zira kept a window open in their cottage at all times, letting the little menaces come and go. They fed themselves happily from a single, miraculously ever-full bowl in the corner of the kitchen and stretched out in front of the perpetually burning log fire in the front room, often two or three at a time. Crowley exchanged hisses with them whenever they crossed paths, but it had become more of a matter of course. It was as if the cats felt the need to lay claim to their territory, but couldn’t really muster the effort to get riled up enough to fight. In turn, Crowley no longer felt a murderous rage every time he tripped one of the sleeping bastards on his way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Something about Zira’s presence tamed them somehow, or maybe it tamed him.

The longer he spent around his angel the less he cared about the little monsters that invaded their space and scratched at their sofas. He could tolerate a ceasefire, a cessation of hostilities, with the few brave monsters that had taken up semi-permanent residence on the spare bed. They made Zira happy, and that was the only thing in the whole of fucking existence that really mattered to the demon.

He might have hated cats since the very creation of Earth, but Crowley knew that he would love Zira to the ends of it, and beyond.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed!
> 
> Please leave a comment or kudos to let me know what you think!


End file.
